Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to message passing and more particularly to message passing in message oriented middleware.
Description of the Related Art
Message oriented middleware refers to a programmatic infrastructure that supports the exchange of messages between distributed computing systems. In this regard, the message brokering operability of message oriented middleware allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms while communicating through message queues managed by a messaging component and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols. In this regard, the message oriented middleware creates a distributed communications layer that insulates the application developer from the details of the various operating system and network interfaces.
Typically, in the simplest form, administration of message oriented middleware takes the form of embedded commands provided by the message oriented middleware that allows a system administrator to create and modify properties of the messaging component. With access to a set of embedded commands, the system administrator then can decide which properties of the messaging component to modify and when. With this type of setup, the administrator needs only a basic understanding of the messaging component of the message oriented middleware. Further, this type of administration generally works on a small scale. However, it is widely understood that message oriented middleware administration through embedded commands scales poorly in a multi-message component deployment.
The deployment of a management infrastructure tool such as a rules engine seeks to address the lack of scalability in the above-mentioned approach. A rules engine interacts with message oriented middleware through interprocess communications in order to retrieve operational characteristics of the middleware including message puts and gets, and provides operational directives through interprocess communications to the middleware in response to the application of rules to the retrieved operational characteristics. The use of a rules engine to manage the operation of message oriented middleware, however, it not without limitation.
In particular, as the rules engine is typically removed from the message oriented middleware, data exchanged between the two using interprocess communications is slow, since a network round trip is required. Therefore, there is usually an incentive to minimize the amount of data passed to the control station, thus, effectively limiting the amount of information available to the control station. In the alternative, a rules engine accessing an application programming interface (API) to the message oriented middleware addresses some of the concerns in respect to slow data exchanges. However, to the extent that the rules engine and message oriented middleware are separate, with the rules engine being maintained by a completely separate group of developers from the developers maintaining the messaging oriented middleware, there are practical difficulties to making the rules engine work effectively with the messaging component and delays in upgrading the rules engine to account for new features in the messaging oriented middleware often arise.